Build a word cloud in 30 seconds

This morning I stumbled across Tagul, an online word cloud creation tool which has a couple of really cool features. The first, is you can upload your own image for it to put your words in (I obviously immediately uploaded our pink owl – Owen). The second, is that you can put in a URL for it to pull the words off of.

Armed with my owl image, I decided to make a word cloud from the import.io blog. Unfortunately, Tagul tried to pull ALL the words off the page including all the stuff in the margins and (I think) some of the meta data, which was really messing up my results. If only there was a way I could quickly pull just the data I wanted from the page and upload it into Tagul.

Oh wait!

I pasted the link to our blog into Magic and just deleted the columns I didn’t want. Then I hit copy table, pasted the result into Tagul and hit Visualize!

Here’s the result…

Pretty cool eh? It was so simple and fun that I decided to do the same thing with a few of my favorite data companies and their logos:

MonkeyLearn

Plot.ly

BigML

Silk.co

Infogr.am

Tableau

Try it yourself

Here’s a quick screen share video I made to show you how I did it (or you can read this tutorial).